France and Britain had been arch enemies for centuries. New France (Quebec) was taken over by the British. Ben Franklin had a newspaper in Montreal. You’d think there’d be some influence and rationale for Quebec to secede from Britain and join the US during the war of independence, but it didn’t. Why not?
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When the British took control of Canada after the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years War), they actually ‘gave’ the mainly Francophone, mainly Catholic Quebecers a great deal of legal rights and protections, such as the right to freely practice Catholicism (the oath of allegiance to the British government originally referred to Protestantism), instituted French legal codes as opposed to British legal codes for the practice of private law, so on and so forth.
Because of this, the Quebecers actually tended to prefer the British governance over the increasingly-rebellious American colonies to their south, largely because the Americans ***did not*** ***like*** the Quebecers, for a number of reasons.
The American colonies had, just a few years before, fought a major war against the Quebecers (and French Canada was a major threat to the American colonies from both regions very beginning, along with French Native American allies). But even ignoring that, and the other religious, societal and cultural issues, the American soldiers of that war ***expected to get paid for their service***.
And in the American colonies, which were perpetually-cash-strapped by design (the British mercantile system was designed to funnel raw resources from America to Britain, not money from Britain to America, and pretty much all of the North American colonies were ***poor as fuck)***, most of that pay had historically come from either loot, or from land-grants taken from conquered land.
But since Quebec was now part of the British empire, their land and property was protected. And vast swathes of what is now the American Midwest (Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, etc) were now protected and Americans were prohibited from settling them. American veterans of the French and Indian Wars were turning to their governments, expecting to get paid, and their governments were turning to the British government, who basically responded with “***fuck you, pay me***”, levying taxes and tariffs and fees onto colonies, and when those colonies protested the taxes, sending military forces to their homes, dissolving local governments, prohibiting protests……. you know where this is going.
TL, DR: The Quebecers didn’t join the American Revolution largely because the British ‘allowed/protected” them in what they wanted to do (Be Catholic, protect their land claims and property, keep French law, etc), and even more than that, the Americans were largely-against the Quebecers for cultural and societal reasons
However, it is important to recognize that other Canadian now-Provinces were much more sympathetic to the Americans, at least at first. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, heavily settled by and linked with New England (even to this day), were sympathetic to the American revolutionaries, Nova Scotia in particular.
A stint of bad luck (British troops were rushed to garrison the provinces and subdue revolutionary intent), bad choices (George Washington didn’t want to invade a province that wasn’t actively rebelling , thinking it would make the Revolution look like aggressors) , and fuckery on the Americans part (American privateers decimated shipping around the Canadian Maritimes, which fucked things up for the British military but also made life hard for Canadian civilians) ended up keeping those Canadians out of the Revolution.
It is also important to note that the Americans did have volunteers come down from Canada to help the Revolution: the 1st and 2nd Canadian Regiments were made of Quebecers.
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